


The Best Mind of Our Generation

by After_Baker_Street



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Poetry, ginsberg, howl - Freeform, letsdrawsherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:36:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/After_Baker_Street/pseuds/After_Baker_Street
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is my entry into the Let's Draw Sherlock!! project - it's a reinterpretation of <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308">Ginsberg's <em>Howl.</em></a> It’s one of the most recognizable poems in the English language, so I took the spirit - the skeleton of it, and ran. It seemed fitting, and slipped easily into the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best Mind of Our Generation

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Howl](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/20762) by Allen Ginsberg. 



I.  
I saw the best mind of our generation destroyed by a madman, dreaming falling desperate,  
  
dragging himself through the treacherous air of early morning to look for an escape,  
  
darkhaired detective falling for the ancient connection - love and protection - against the angry dynamo of a faithless criminal  
  
who fought the one who controlled this wicked spiderweb of gangsters, half-cocked and strings plucked at all the right places,  
  
who brought brilliance and blindness all in one, kept the skies in their place with the brute force of logic,  
  
who painted the bitter truths on mobile screens, texted gods and dwarves and children,  
  
who was called The Virgin, The Freak, The Addict, Hat Man, Internet Detective, A Sociopath, A Proper Genius,  
  
who talked to the ghost of a partner who was over two hundred and sixty miles away even by the slipstream of the M6,  
  
who called for the cocaine fix to quiet the clamor of a brain firing itself in more dimensions and directions than reality can support,  
  
who heard it all, the accusations dripping on every lip, the angry push of the papers screaming his name, the doubt of a king,  
  
nearly drowned beneath a tsunami of tea and store-bought-biscuits and careful conversation from a flatmate who knew no words that could comfort,  
  
Ugly woolen patterns telegraphing an ocean of desire and silent longing built out of denial and late-night runs on oil-slicked alleys,  
  
who knew the tang of adrenaline at the back of the throat, rushing, hysterical heart pounding at the cage of the chest,  
  
screaming silently the art of decomposition, the dance of insects gnawing at bones indescribably beautiful, the skull a companion of sorts to carry conversations about the surprise of livor mortis, the fibers beneath broken nails carrying secrets secrets always secrets,  
  
choreographed confrontations dangerous beyond all mortal ken, handcuffed to the only face he ever loved,  
  
built himself a palace out of the square brutal rock of isolation and intelligence, cleverness given form and more lonly than Kal-El in a fortress of ice, a place where no warm hand could reach - not the square sensible hands of an angry army doctor whose hand never shakes,  
  
Never learned you do not play games which cannot possibly be won, not with sick Irishmen threatening cardiac immolation, not with the gay trickster from IT who slips you his number and thinks you’ll call,  
  
who elucidates all mysteries for you, complex formulae skipping just behind his eyes, the tedium of lists too long to have an end,  
  
who first appeared in a morgue! bent over voiceless corpses, begging for the clue to unlock the broken box of innocence, or guilt -either weighing equally in his mind,  
  
who spoke before falling, lies and lies to bury a small fair-haired man, to confuse and misdirect him until he was crushed - years of waiting before him, but grief like a rotten thing already tearing at his heart, grief the size of every future he built for himself, grief to return to that sick consolation prize of a life he found after being torn by an angry bronze bullet,  
  
who gave himself a lie of a label to secret himself behind, psychiatric jargon to threaten and stump the snarling beasts of normality, despite all evidence to the contrary, a frustrated heart he stunted to give wings to a burgeoning brain always hungry, starving, and unsatisfied,  
  
who smuggled illegal guns to crimescenes undetected by a clever wind-up fox, a fox who leapt into his maw to pull the ghosts of clues from between his gnashing teeth, between his grinding jaws fell truth and clarity, a way home to a broken den and a missing mate for our friend argentum vulpes,  
  
returning years later, will his curls droop and color white streaks into their dark springs? an angry friend screaming against the hallucination - the dead do not return, broken skulls fuse themselves whole again, there is no pass from noctem aeternus his friend will insist until his throat grows raw and bloody, will there be something beyond that wall of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, will it be safety for a surgeon who never sleeps?  
  
they create together the syntax and measure of poetry unknown to spiders and webs, their memories alone feed the broken beast of love, kept down in the gut with the pressure of shame and silence, it surfaces again to speak with dreadful ease into the delicate shape of their ears while they struggle to rebalance what was lost,  
  
he will rise reincarnate into life, breathed from two-dimensionality by longing and angry want, his heart beating painfully,  
  
but now he lies butchered, brought down by a mirror he could not have imaged, a dream of a demon brought to life by the sickness of men - men planning for thousands of years, brought down by chaos spinning at the heart of the universe.  
  
  
II.  
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open his skull to eat up his brain and imagination?  
  
Moriarty! Madness! Ugliness! Ash and despair and the worst of what this thing called humanity has to offer! He is the weeping child at the heart of the fire! He is the thing that will burn and burn and never be consumed!  
  
Moriarty! His voice a carrion crow to peck at the blank eyes of a broken man, unprotected by a long wool jacket! Moriarty a devil come to greet us in our own house!  
  
Moriarty whose love is a stone carried at the back of the throat! Moriarty who is a cannibal dynamo! Moriarty whose head is still smoking and burst wide and red!  
  
Moriarty who we must all abandon, Moriarty who sells us our own our own wine made from blood and tears never shed!  
  
Moriarty who is Mister Sex and who bred the shattered souls of criminals until they shined and could weave for him a pattern of unknowable grief!  
  
Moriarty who demanded the sacrifice of the clever! Moriarty who bound the chest of a puppet with explosives and licked his lips while doing so! Moriarty for whom nothing was too costly!  
  
Moriarty for whom we would all burn our children! Moriarty whose soul is electricity and binary code! Moriarty the prison of our madness!  
  
Moriarty who poured poison into the ear of our prince! Moriarty who pushed him down until his blood mingled with rainwater!  
  
 He bade farewell! He jumped off the roof to solitude! waving! scarf flying! Down to the pavement! into the street!


End file.
